The Thousands

Based on a comic book about a comic-book fan who decides to become a superhero, Kick-Ass is a meta-valentine to comic-book nerd culture and the plotlines of Batman and Spider-Man. And like superhero comics generally, Kick-Ass indulges nerds’ fantasies of righteousness and power reversal.

Like Tobey Maguire, the charming Aaron Johnson is too doe-eyed and buff to be entirely plausible as a teenage dropkick who pulls on more neoprene than he can pull off. Meanwhile, Nicolas Cage isn’t Batman, but he’s batshit crazy as wronged cop Damon Macready, whose complex revenge plot against drug lord Frank D’Amico (Mark Strong) includes training his daughter Mindy (Chloe Moretz) as tiny assassin Hit-Girl and drawing self-referential comics. Christopher ‘McLovin’ Mintz-Plasse is villain’s son Chris D’Amico, alias Red Mist.

Kick-Ass combines stylised, John Woo-style fight scenes with Apatovian smart talk, but intriguingly, it’s largely the work of Brits. Director Matthew Vaughn helmed Layer Cake; Strong was the villain in Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes; Johnson played John Lennon in Nowhere Boy. Perhaps because of this transcontinental mashup, the tone is unsettling. The violence is gruesome and sadistic, yet my audience laughed, cheered and applauded each ass-kicking setpiece.